


purple, and not just the one underneath our eyes from exhaustion

by Randy_sensei



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: A Random Trope, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/F, May Prompt Challenge 2019, Post-Canon, Spoilers, but also kinda, duh - Freeform, mine was red pill blue pill which is this game's ending through and through
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-26 10:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19004218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randy_sensei/pseuds/Randy_sensei
Summary: Max has seen this tornado far too many times and hoped it would go away every single time. So far, it hasn't done that once. She'd be disappointed if she wasn't scared for her fucking life.Destiny and the cards its played suck, so Max throws her hand to the wind and draws another.





	purple, and not just the one underneath our eyes from exhaustion

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, y'all! 
> 
> (By y'all I mean the two consistent readers I (might) have), 
> 
> Life has been giving me some shit and it has been a hectic two months, which is when I last updated anything, but don't worry if you care! I'll be out of the water soon and back to actually writing. This little ficlet alone was slapped together within forty minutes. 
> 
> This is for the Random Trope Challenge on /r/fanfiction and its Discord, and the trope I got, as you can see by the tags, is Red Pill, Blue Pill. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy it about as much as I've enjoyed writing it!

A head drenched with its own wind-whipped hair shakes in disbelief at nature’s very own disciple coming to rain down destruction upon sinners unholy.  


Or sinner, singular. One blue haired one and her accomplice, whose frame shakes at the very sight and utters, manic rambling bordering quite closely to crazy. Insane, even. If anyone had even seen the things she has or if anyone were to lend an ear to what she has to say, they’d denounce her as such within a heartbeat. 

Yet here she stands, crumbling and at defeat’s door, unsure of whether her next step is into the past or straight off this cliff. 

At first, she thinks she’s shaking her own head at the thought, but no, it's the blue hair again, tears lining her eyes and hair just as plastered from the torrential rain around them. 

“Come on, Max,” she says, desperate, “don’t conk out on me yet!” 

A hard swallow. “What do you mean don’t conk out?!” Max asks, voice raised to counter the winds, one last meager ‘fuck you’ to the tornado. “What am I supposed to do?! We’re fucked, Chloe!” 

Silence fills the air between them, the downpour unaccounted for and Max at a loss for words. Both of them, standing there, the stuff of legends on the horizon, tearing up their stomping ground as if it were nothing but a fucking flyer you didn’t want but was handed. 

“You know,” Max starts, “Every time we’ve come up here to see it, part of me hopes it just... disappears. But it never does, just gets bigger! Every time.” 

Sinners paired stand, watching, with nothing to do but and Chloe turns to Max with a look of worry and defeat and plenty of other emotions Max dare not name lest she’d crumble to dust and cry her soul out, like she’s been wanting– planning, rather– this whole Week That Never Was. 

She’s seen this before, this fucking tornado. Yet the words sit on her tongue, just shy of revealing the truth to the person that means the most and the lie itself is like a dagger swallowed badly, all sideways and such. 

Though, the slightest notions of surprise etch in Chloe’s face before she turns to that  _ fucking _ shitwind spectacle and back to Max, only instead of gloom, revelation sits in its place. If Max had to guess, the revelation that they’re fucking dead is the one lined up. 

“I have an idea!” she shouts, the raindrops pounding against Max’s skull in a careful attempt at a headache as she squints and hopes. For once. Her eyes go wide at the little white-framed rectangle twined between Chloe’s fingers when her hand comes back. 

Her eyes go wide in equal parts surprise, equal parts disgust. 

Max recoils at the very sight when her worst fear (past the giant fucking tornado) is confirmed by what little blue shines past the rain already drenching the paper in the mere seconds it's been revealed to the elements. 

“Chloe! I can’t! You know I can’t do it!” Max shouts back, anger beginning to rise in her throat, yet tasting a whole lot like desperation. In the midst of all of this, her right hand tingles ever so slightly, right before Chloe goes to take it in her own. 

“Yes, you can!” is shouted back at her, the contract of faith shoved into her hand and with it, inevitable suffering, her own or that of others. “It’s the only right choice! Those people don’t deserve to die because of me!” 

The pinpricks in Max’s eyes leave just around when the waterworks start and she can’t tell apart her tears from the rain, but it seems like the most important person right now  _ does _ . A pale hand washed out even further underneath the grey duvet of clouds and despair comes to wipe underneath an eye, one marked with exhaustion. 

Max leans into the hand, using her own to push it closer fruitlessly as fucking “destiny” runs rampant around in the background. Her disgust grows the longer it's in her vision, peripheral or not. Fuck that tornado, she thinks, fuck destiny and fuck this time bullshit she’s been given. Who would ever want this, she ponders for a split second, before coming to the conclusion of ‘who gives a fuck.’ 

“ _ Fuck _ the right choice,” Max echoes the thoughts that don’t feel right, their exit leaving a bad taste on her lips even as they go. “You know you’re all that matters to me, Chloe!” 

Max now understands how clear-cut tears are in the rain forged of the sadness and suffering placed upon the shoulders of someone as young as Chloe, when she starts crying too. A quick tug of the waterlogged beanie gets their foreheads together, noses touching and acting as waterfalls all the same and in that moment, Chloe chuckles. 

“Never figured my own  _ life _ would come down to the choices of red pill, blue pill,” she says, sighing deeply enough to make her shoulders bob and Max gives her a puzzled look, packaged with an equally dry, borderline mocking chuckle. 

“Destiny is fucked like that,” Max replies, another laugh fading on the tip of her tongue, the two intertwined in each other despite all the ongoing fuckery. Chloe’s kiss is not unexpected but it is very much desperate; almost as if it’s their last. 

The very thought of that breaks something in Max, a new flame lighting in her chest when she thinks of just what to do. If “destiny” gave her a gift, it’s hers to play with. The inevitable future of this town, be damned. She figures that… with enough time in the world, she can figure out a way around it. 

Fuck,  _ through _ it if she has to. Through that tornado, or perhaps destiny. Max ponders Chloe’s words closely and chuckles something dry, despite being wet from head to toe. 

“I’m not worth your trouble, Max,” Chloe says, weakly, at the edge of more tears and just about to slip off, “Forget about me! Live your life and leave me and this shitty place in the dust!” Her head is wrapped in Max’s hands, Max leaving all of her love and desperation in the one kiss she places on her lips, hard. In the downtime between words, she wonders if it was good enough. 

“Chloe, you are! You’re worth far more! I’ll take any trouble that comes along because I know it’ll be worth it every time,” Max encourages, “I don’t want to hear that crap from you, when you know that there won’t ever be a goodbye between us! Not while I’m alive.” 

In that moment, framed by naught but the whirlwinding clusterfuck behind her, Chloe Price is the only person alive of Maxine Caulfield, with the former party having a pretty firm grip on the idea that it will stay that way, the firm grip sitting idly as a plan hatches, forms. 

“There’s never going to be a goodbye,” Max echoes, between kisses, when Chloe looks at her in disbelief, “While I’m alive, there won’t ever be a goodbye. It’s never goodbye.”  
“Max… what are you saying?” 

Taking a step back, Max reaches for the bit of history that started this all, the one picture she equal parts regrets the most and yet the very least and looks to it with a huff, the rain cornering her vision to it like a vignette. 

“If your destiny was just to… d-die in some.. dirty fucking bathroom at the hands of Nathan Prescott, then I won’t fucking have it,” she says, grip on the polaroid tightening, “And I won’t have any of its red pill, blue pill  _ shit!” _

Chloe stares, disbelief in its purest form mixed with nothing else past love written across her features as she watches a fire burn on in Max. With another look at the picture stuck between her fingers, she asks the tornado forlornly. 

“I wonder, if destiny ever foresaw a purple?! Does it account for that,” she wonders aloud. “Or do I have to carve my own path?!” 

 

With that, time crawls to a stop with the last kiss they share before the storm of trial and error that comes. 

  
  



End file.
